The Unbelievers. Royal Court.

Nick Payne’s first new theatre work in 6 years, The Unbelievers, explores a woman’s determined, near psychotic inability to move on after her 15-year-old son goes missing. The mother, the testy, mercurial, in-your-face Miriam — a powerhouse performance from Nicola Walker — seldom leaves the stage, and there are hints that the fractured series of events portrayed is a jumble of memories emerging almost randomly.

Others around Miriam are mourning, too — former husbands, the boy’s siblings, their partners — but other people’s pain only touches her tangentially. She is a woman who comes to be enclosed in an almost hermetically sealed capsule of all-encompassing and isolating grief. Her grinding insistence that the boy is still alive moves from a sensible parent’s modus operandi in dealing with his loss to become a private article of faith that shuts out those who share her pain but want to move on. Strip away her unshakable faith, let the unbelievers around her in, and what will be left of the woman and mother?

Payne’s narrative shifts between three distinct timelines: events in the hours and days after Oscar’s disappearance; scenes a year on, when we first encounter Miriam; and then 7 years later, in the run-up to a memorial service for the boy, which the woman is determined to miss. The timelines bleed into each other. There are no blackouts, no scene changes, and no transitions. Shifts are marked by changes in illumination (superb, subtle work by lighting designer Jack Knowles).

The non-linear structure takes a while to get used to, but Payne and director Marianne Elliott are in no particular hurry; indeed, the piece takes an age to get going and only really delivers in its final 45 minutes. Bunny Christie’s set provides a kind of municipal waiting room behind the main stage, where characters go to wait — heads bowed, hands wringing — when not part of the action. The idea that the lives of almost everybody involved here are partly or wholly on hold, waiting for Miriam to move on, is deftly expressed.

We first encounter Miriam with a bleeding hand. She has had to smash open the window of her locked car with a garden gnome on a visit to Yorkshire to follow up on one of many claimed sightings of Oscar. “It was either that or throw myself off the Humber Bridge”, she explains with gallows humour to her sensible, straight-talking daughter, Mags (Ella Lily Hyland, tremendous), and her near-hyperventilating ex-husband David (Paul Higgins, bewildered, permanently on the edge).

David, who has an ongoing problem with bad breath, and his new squeeze, Lorraine (Lucy Thackeray also plays a straight-talking detective), have just visited a cathedral organist to learn what “pulling out all the stops” means — a metaphor for Miriam’s total emotional commitment to her cause. Miriam keeps Oscar’s room as a kind of shrine for 7 years. She destroys a neighbouring child’s bike for some minor insult, and fronts up to a fellow shopper in a supermarket. No wonder Mags, now pregnant with a buffoonish bird-lover Benjamin (Harry Kershaw channels a young Boris Johnson), tells her, “you’re a fucking lunatic… the only thing going on inside my head is like, is she about to go mental”.

There is another ex-husband, Karl (Martin Marquez impresses in an underdeveloped role), in the background. Alcoholic turned vicar, his job seems to be to remind Miriam, if only she would listen, of the moral and spiritual grounding she loses in her increasingly spiteful attempts to hold on to her beliefs. Much more in the foreground is Miriam’s non-binary child Nancy (a beautifully judged turn from Alby Baldwin), who is haunted by what may be Oscar’s ghost. Their spiritual insights see two amusingly clumsy members of the Society for Psychical Research (Isobel Adomakoh Young and Jaz Singh Deol) invited for advice, a connection that leads to a séance, and the first real crack in Miriam’s steely carapace of faith.

Payne has a habit of counterpointing emotional turmoil with caustic comedy, and there is much to laugh at here, a reminder that humour is sometimes the only way of coping with near-unendurable tragedy. Miriam’s gruff unpredictability, deadpan stares, and eye-rolling impatience draw laughs. Yet only one scene is played for obvious laughs, a sit-com-like encounter between Puffin-loving Benjamin and blousy Lorraine, who may well have walked in from a production of Abigail’s Party. The encounter is hilarious indeed, but tonally completely at odds with the rest of the play. It works, just about, because it reminds us how Miriam sees those less entirely dedicated to finding Oscar as she is: quite literally, as jokers.

Oscar is never found, but finding him is not the point of this unsettling play. Flawed as it sometimes is, The Unbelievers is a fine piece of work gifted with a stunning central performance.

Writer:   Nick Payne

Director:    Marianne Elliott